The Power Up ⎯ SN.01/EP.05
How To Let Education Guide Your Sales Channel Strategy
When your business caters to only 10% of the market, how do you grow? You focus your strategy on inspiring more demand. That’s exactly what the team at Tradition Coffee Roasters has been doing since 2019 as they’ve expanded from a coffee of the month club to e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, and wholesale.
Education has been at the root of increasing their audience across different sales channels. Lindsey co-owner of Tradition Coffee Roasters shares, “Most people don’t know how to explore coffee. They think it’s just light, medium, and dark. But we’re introducing them to why this country is interesting [or] how this fermentation process affects the coffee. We’re showing people all that and describing it so they understand what they’re doing.”
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About The Business
Business name: Tradition Coffee Roasters
Founded: 2019
Owners: Lindsey and Brian Burik
Location: Kailua, HI
Website: https://traditioncoffeeroasters.com
Sales diversification strategy: E-commerce, coffee shop, wholesale, coffee of the month club, roasters tours, classes
About Our Guest
For many years Lindsey worked on Wall Street while her husband, Brian, was a NYC firefighter. When Brian was looking for his second career, Lindsey also took the opportunity to get out of corporate America. Together they moved to Hawaii and started an online coffee club where they curated new and fun coffee bags for subscribers each month.
Finding success, Lindsey and Brian expanded to wholesale and eventually needed to move to a larger location where they opened their coffee shop. Lindsey attributes the cafe as their most exciting accomplishment. Located in an industrial area, the “hidden gem” status draws people in organically.
To discover how Tradition Coffee Roasters educates their customers and partners, listen to the whole episode on The Power Up.
Full Transcript
Sean (Thrive): Hello everyone, it’s Sean from Thrive with another episode of The Power Up where I meet with successful small business owners and operators to learn about their business strategy so you can take their insights and level up your own business. Once your business is ready to expand, knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Our guests have some creative solutions for how they’ve tackled tricky problems and turned them into growth opportunities. Now, let’s dive into today’s episode.
Our guest today is Lindsay, who is the owner and COO of Tradition Coffee Roasters. In 2019, Tradition Coffee Roasters started as part of the e-commerce subscription cafes. The co-founder, Brian, who’s a retired New York City firefighter, began curating unique and fun coffee for customers each month. Since then, they have expanded to wholesale and a storefront location in Kihei, Hawaii.
Their focus is elevating people’s coffee experience, and they achieve this with a specialty high-grade roast, which only accounts for approximately 10% of the entire coffee market. Their cafe is also located in an industrial area in Hawaii, which adds to the fun because of its hidden gem status.
Lindsay, are you ready to get started?
Lindsey (Tradition Coffee Roasters): Yeah, all set.
Sean: All right, so my first question right off the bat is about Brian. Is he so active in the business, and how did he go from firefighter to getting into the coffee roasting business? What’s that look like for him?
Lindsey: Yeah, great question. So Brian was a New York City fireman from 1997 to 2018, and when he retired, he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life for a second career. He was always a home-roaster, home brewer, and he had all these crazy spreadsheets on the wall and data. I looked at him and said, I think you’re doing your next passion.
So we moved to Hawaii. I was on Wall Street for 20 years and was very ready to be done with that, and we came to the state that does coffee. We started, as you mentioned, with our subscription business where we curate a fun and different bag of coffee every month for people, and then from there expanded into wholesale and then our brick and mortar.
Sean: All right, and what were you doing on Wall Street? That sounds like a fun career as well.
Lindsey: I was doing international trading, so everything aside from the US.
Sean: All right, so talk to me a little bit about your guys’ audience because there’s lots of coffee roasters and coffee businesses out there. How do you guys think about your target audience, and what does that look like for you guys as you have changed over the years?
Lindsey: Great question. So the coffee market is a fairly saturated space at this point. We focus on specialty coffee, which you mentioned in the intro is about 10% of the world’s coffee market. That means the coffee is rated 80 and higher, much like your wine has a rating, so does your coffee. That means they meet certain taste qualifications. We also look for things that have other certifications like fair trade, organic, women-owned, Rainforest Alliance, Bird Friendly, etc.
What we really focus on is making specialty coffee approachable. So whether you like a light roast or a dark roast, or you brew with a K-cup or a French press, all of that is great with us. We’re just here to help elevate your coffee game to the extent that you would like to. And if you love a dark roast, so do we. It’s great as long as that dark roast is good and its quality, then we will help you make that coffee cup taste even better.
Sean: Got it. What’s your personal favorite way of brewing a cup of coffee?
Lindsey: It varies. Sometimes we love doing pour-overs. If it’s a particularly rainy day here in Hawaii, then we’ll take the time to do a nice, long, slow pour-over and have a cozy cup of coffee. Sometimes it can get super hot in July and August, so we’re going more for cold brew or Nitro, or iced latte on that side. So we’re really mood dependent on how we serve it.
Sean: That’s wonderful. So I think you dug into it briefly, but I want to go back to it for a second. You said to meet the definition of a specialty coffee, the coffee itself has to mean a score of 80 or higher. Dig into how that score is created. I have no idea.
Lindsey: Sure. So that’s one of the things we focus on in the shop. We do a lot of education around coffee, so we’ll teach people this exact concept. Coffee gets scored on things like acidity, which is brightness in coffee, not acid reflux; we don’t want high scores in that. It’s brightness in coffee, sweetness, body, flavor, aroma, and uniformity. Those are some of the categories that we get graded on in the coffee world.
We have what’s called a Q grader, quality grader, that’s akin to like a sommelier of coffee. There are about 6,000 in the world right now who are qualified to grade coffee. Brian, my husband and partner in the business, is three tests away from getting his Q grader test completed, which is huge. There’s about 15 in the state of Hawaii and about 650 in the United States. They are the people who are qualified to officially give that grade to coffee.
Sean: Very cool. How long does it take? How long has it taken Brian so far to go through this process?
Lindsey: I mean, just when you include the study time alone, you’re looking at a year or two to complete that certification. The fail rate’s pretty high on it. We don’t know of anybody who passes the first time they take it. So you kind of chip away at all these tests. It’s much like getting your Cicerone for beer. It’s the same arduous palate tests that they do on those ones.
Sean: That’s great. What’s the name of the authority running the test?
Lindsey: It’s the Specialty Coffee Association, an organization that a lot of people will be a member of. Each state will sometimes have their own, or each country will branch under the Specialty Coffee Association. The Q grader is a global certification that’s actually run by an organization that just focuses on Q grading.
Sean: Very neat. Love talking to businesses like yours because I learn all this kind of stuff. Very cool.
So when you’re thinking about your product assortment in your business, do you like to change radically depending on if you’re listing online for wholesale or if you’re listing on your normal e-commerce website or selling in person? How do you guys think about product assortment across the different channels?
Lindsey: Great question. We will have certain things that we will do only in the shop that you can only get in person. We found that it creates this kind of hidden gem status we’ve established for ourselves, where, hey, if you find us, there’s this really cool coffee or local craft that you can find up here.
When it comes to wholesale and e-commerce, those tend to run pretty parallel. It keeps the management of that a little more simplified, and then people also know that a lot of our wholesale is through word of mouth, so it’s things that they’re saying that they’re also saying on the retail side. We’ve just found that keeping that fairly consistent has helped with that word of mouth concept and marketing in general.
Sean: Okay. Would you say if you were to divide your business percentage-wise across wholesale, traditional e-commerce, and physical retail, where does wholesale sit for you guys as a percentage of your business?
Lindsey: From a gross revenue perspective, wholesale makes up about 40% of it, our e-commerce is about 15%, and then our brick and mortar is the remaining 35ish percent.
Sean: Interesting. Is wholesale the channel you guys are really focusing on right now?
Lindsey: We’re focusing mostly on wholesale and e-commerce right now. The retail side, the brick and mortar, is newer for us. It’s going on about two years, and that seems to be growing at a really nice organic pace that we can keep up with. It’s not growing too fast, not too slow, so we kind of want to let that chug along at an organic pace. So the focus is way more on wholesale and e-commerce because we find it’s very sticky, especially with that subscription business. Even from a balance sheet perspective, it’s great predictable revenue.
Sean: So talk to me a little bit about the subscription side. Who do you guys use to manage the subscription component? Do you use an app or something on your website to manage that?
Lindsey: We do. We use Recharge. It’s our third one we’ve used, but we’re actually pretty happy with them. They have the functionality that we need. Shopify powers our e-commerce, and Recharge works well with Shopify. That was the big hindrance we had with the other two that we were using.
I come from a technology background with the trading side. Trading is all done electronically now, so having systems work together and speak and play nicely together is huge for me. Things that are under the umbrella of working under the core of it, which for us is Shopify, is a huge factor because the way we focus on our business is that humans should be doing engagement and high-quality thinking and projects, and the computers and machines should be doing the routine, mundane tasks. We’ve tried to separate our staffing and machinery, and technology that way.
Sean: That makes a lot of sense. How do you approach subscriptions? Do you let customers choose their bag, or do you curate it for them?
Lindsey: We found very early on to keep it simple, which is why 97% of our subscriptions are “we choose the bag for you” each month. Most people don’t know how to explore coffee. They think it’s just light, medium, and darks, but we’re introducing them to why this country is interesting, how this fermentation process affects the coffee, and how this honey or natural process affects the coffee. We’re showing people all that and describing it so they understand what they’re doing.
We find that if people just subscribe to the dark roast every month or the light roast every month, it gets boring. People want diversity in what they’re doing. We steer people accordingly. We have some pretty steady customers who always have our Firehouse blend every month, but most people stick with the subscription, where we’re curating it for them and taking them on a coffee journey.
Sean: Do you charge more for that curated subscription?
Lindsey: No, it’s the same across the board. Our subscription is $24 a month, which includes shipping for one bag of coffee. About 80% of what we do is going to the mainland, not so much here in Hawaii. We retail that coffee bag usually at a higher price, between $27 and $32, because they’re usually micro-lot, small batch, cool processing—something different and unique about it.
Sean: How do you convert single-purchase customers into subscription customers?
Lindsey: Most of our conversion is from tours and tastings that we’re doing. A lot of conversion happens from in-person engagement that converts to a subscription. We see much higher growth in that channel than taking a single purchase customer and converting them to a subscription. We do see some of that happen, but it’s not nearly as frequent as when there’s actual human engagement.
Sean: Do you have any automated marketing flows or drip campaigns to try to convert customers to subscriptions?
Lindsey: We do. We use Omnisend for that. That’s what’s doing some of that. Even as consumers, we’re kind of wise to what’s happening with some of that. We see repeat orders happen when those emails hit, but converting to subscription again is lower than when we do human-to-human stuff.
Sean: For those not aware, can you explain the sensitivity around using something like Omnisend?
Lindsey: Sure. At some point, no matter how cute or fun you try to make your emails, it feels impersonal. Where we have the most repeat buying is our “Here’s what’s happening for the month at Tradition Coffee Roasters,” community engagement events, and small business collaboration events. Those tend to get more repeat buys or engagement than “Hey, it’s been two weeks since your last order, we thought you might be interested in our subscription.”
It’s more of an organic approach, like “Here’s a little bit about our small business,” or Brian did a really nice piece on 9/11. We also do Coffee Talk Mondays, where we teach people about coffee. Those kinds of things have way more engagement.
Sean: That’s great. Getting close to the end, a couple more questions. On the wholesale side, if you’re talking to another business owner who hasn’t dipped their toes in wholesale or it hasn’t gone well, what are some top points or strategies you’d tell them to make wholesale successful?
Lindsey: We’ve decided early on that because we’re a premium product, we hold firm on premium pricing. We’re not the most expensive coffee provider, but we’re also not the cheapest. That means we’re going to pair it with white glove service. When we work with a cafe, for example, we also help train their baristas on how to properly brew the coffee, how to dial in the espresso shots, and how to do latte art.
We want to make sure that the product is represented well because if the barista doesn’t know how to make the coffee taste good, it reflects poorly on us. So our approach is to be a partner, not just a supplier. We want to be involved with the wholesale clients, provide training, and be responsive to their needs. That builds loyalty and helps the wholesale relationship thrive.
Sean: That’s a great approach. So it’s not just about selling the coffee but about building a partnership and ensuring a quality experience for the end customer.
Lindsey: Exactly. And we also try to be very selective with who we wholesale to. We want to make sure the business aligns with our values and that they’re committed to quality. That way, it’s a win-win for both of us.
Sean: Makes sense. Now, what’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as you’ve grown the business?
Lindsey: I’d say balancing growth with maintaining quality and customer experience. When you grow quickly, it’s easy to lose sight of the personal touch that made your business special in the first place. We’ve been very intentional about growing at a pace that we can manage while keeping that high level of quality and service.
Sean: That’s smart. What’s next for Tradition Coffee Roasters? Any exciting plans on the horizon?
Lindsey: We’re looking at expanding our wholesale footprint more aggressively, especially on the mainland. We’re also exploring some new product lines, like ready-to-drink cold brew options and some coffee-related merchandise. And of course, continuing to grow our community here in Hawaii with events and education.
Sean: Sounds like you have a lot of exciting things coming. Last question, if you could give one piece of advice to small business owners looking to grow, what would it be?
Lindsey: Focus on your core values and don’t compromise on quality. Growth is great, but if you lose what makes your business unique and special, you lose your customers. Stay true to your mission, and your customers will follow.
Sean: Great advice. Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story and insights. It’s been a pleasure.
Lindsey: Thank you, Sean. I really enjoyed it.
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